Movie Review: Nightlight (2014)

The directing duo of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods bring us ‘Nightlight’, a tale of possession, suicide and five dumb kids exploring the woods, while playing idiotic games, like train dodging. This found footage film stars ‘The Social Network’ actress Shelby Young, as the main character Robin, along side Chloe Bridges (The Carrie Diaries), Carter Jenkins (Valentine’s Day), Mitch Hewer (Skins), Kyle Fain (End of Innocents) and Taylor Murphy from the ‘Scream’ series.

Robin, the focus of the movie, joins a group of teenagers in the woods for a night of games and to get closer to one of the guys. The five teens head deep into a haunted forest to test their will by participating in a series of “flashlight games”. One by one the kids are separated and killed off by an entity, which is never fully seen. Robin believes that the angry spirit is that of her friend who committed suicide there, but we never know for sure. The entity seems to hop from possessing one teen to the next with one goal, killing them all and doing it without letting us really see it.

As for the story line, there really wasn’t much of one and often aspects of the story just did not line up. What’s worse than shaky found footage in the dark? Shaky found footage in the dark with the light constantly blinking on and off. There was only one brief scene with special effects, that didn’t involve a view of only some random blinking lights. The characters were your stereotypical horror movie teenagers, the mean girl, the sweet girl, the new girl, the horn-dog, and the hot guy, no surprise there. Ugh! There was literally nothing that impressed me about this movie. I assume that their target audience was teenagers, but I doubt teenagers are dumb enough to actually enjoy this movie.

I can sum up my opinion of ‘Nightlight’ in one word, horrible. If you insist on seeing ‘Nightlight’, it’s now out on DVD.